This invention relates to authentication of entities represented in social networking systems in general and in particular to authenticating a persona in a social networking system.
Social networking systems store user profile information provided by users including but not limited to hometown, current city, education history, employment history, photos, and events the user participated in the user's profile. Users utilize social networking systems because social networking systems allow them to create connections with friends and interact with each other. Social networking systems allow users to view other user's profile, organize events, and invite friends to participate in those events.
Social networking systems provide various types of functionality to users to communicate with each other, for example, by using wall posts, private messages, poking, and the like. These communication mechanisms allow users to exchange information with each others. Social networking systems also allow a user to share information with other users, for example, by posting content on the social networking system. A user can post an image, video, or text content so that other users can access it. A user can also make information describing the user's user profile information accessible to other users. This allows other users to learn about the user.
Certain users, for example, celebrities play certain roles that may be different from their private lives. For example, a movie actor or a television celebrity may play a certain role that is popular amongst users. Some celebrities may want to make certain specific aspects of their profile available to other users. As a result, such users make a special web page available via the social networking system that provides the information they want to make available to other users. This type of information made available by a celebrity can be very popular in the social networking system and may be accessed by a large number of users.
However, if certain information is very popular in the social networking system, other users attempt to make fake copies of the information, for example, to attract web traffic. These fake copies are created and maintained by users that may be unrelated to the original user, for example, the original celebrity. As a result, the information provided in these fake copies is often incorrect and may mislead fans of the celebrity. A fan of the celebrity who looks for information would like to find the authentic information provided by the celebrity rather than fake information provided by another user that is unrelated to the celebrity. Social networking systems would like to direct fans or other users to the authentic information provided by a celebrity rather than fake information.
Conventional systems perform manual verification wherein the social networking system directly contacts the celebrity and verifies which information was provided by the celebrity. Since this process is a manual process, it is not scalable since human intervention is required. If the social networking system has a large number of accounts, determining the authentic personas can be a resource intensive process.